Idyllwild Climate/Weather Information

Click the image above to view Idyllwild's historical climate data

Energy use depends partly on climate conditions, which differ throughout the state. To standardize calculations and to provide a basis for presenting the criteria, the Energy Commission has established 16 climate zones, which are used with both the low-rise residential and the nonresidential standards. The 16 climate zones represent a geographic area for which an energy budget is established. These energy budgets are the basis for their standards... "(An) energy budget is the maximum amount of energy that a building, or portion of a building...can be designed to consume per year." See the figure below.



Idyllwild is located in Climate Zone 16:

Climate Zone 16 is a high, mountainous and semiarid region above 5,000 feet in elevation. It covers a large area from the Oregon Border to San Bernadino county. The climate is mostly cold, but seasonal changes are well defined and summer temperatures can be mild. Temperature varies tremendously with the slope orientation and elevation, but cool temperatures and snow cover predominate for more than half of the year. Fortunately, summer temperatures are modest, although the nights are cool. The annual precipitation can between 30-60 inches a year in this large geographic region, 90% of which falls in the winter.

We Must Build 15% better than Title 24 allows

I've done some research on the solar rebates for the PV systems we're installing.

One of the important things I've learned thus far is the need to get our architect to get our energy compliance certificate (title 24) to at least 15% better than standard building code allows, otherwise no rebate!

Also, in a hasty response to one of our solar installers' recommendations that, because of increased supply, rebates in California will decrease substantially starting in December, I uncovered a website that we can use to track the solar rebate schedule.

The California Solar Initiative (CSI) rebates program is designed to automatically decline in "steps" based on the volume of solar megawatts confirmed within each utility service territory. The following link is to the CSI Statewide Trigger Point Tracker.

http://www.sgip-ca.com/

At any time we can view the current step for both commercial and residential incentives to see how many megawatts remain in that current step. Right now for SCE, the residential customer class is in step 3 and there remains 8.7 megawatts available. Any authorized solar vendor can reserve our rebate when we sign a contract and it will remain locked in for 12 months with the ability to extend another 6 if needed. The rebate belongs to us (the customer) and not the company who initiated the reservation. If we needed to we could have SCE change the installing contractor on our solar job.

With regard to sense of urgency in reserving the rebate now, solar companies have conflicting opinions: some don't see the rebate changing in the next few weeks since there's still 8.7 megawatts in the current step (BP Solar); others, however, suggest hurrying up signing up for solar now (Empire Solar Solutions, SolarCity).

With the link above we can periodically check for ourselves to monitor how fast the rebates are being reserved. Since we're still in the planning phase of the project, at this point we'd still would be making a very rough guess at how much solar is needed. That being said, at any time and when we're ready, solar companies can reserve a rebate for us and get us locked in at the current step.